Developing a marketing strategy requires time and money and not a little blood, sweat and tears. So how can you ensure your investment is working?

It's time to find the right analytics for you.

With the frenetic pace of fluctuating consumer trends, an ability to keep up (and ideally, predict) changes is paramount. Analytics allow you to identify not only the return on investment (ROI) of the individual marketing campaigns within your strategy but also how each campaign performs against the others. This will help guide future decisions and help you identify trends to capitalise on.

So which analytics tool is best for your business? We’ve put together a list of the top 10 analytics tools to help you decide.

1.Google Analytics

Google Analytics is used by over 50% of the top 10,000 websites in the world. It is a free service that generates information and statistics about activities such as advertising and campaign performance, audience characteristics and behaviour, and conversion rates. Custom reports can be built in a matter of minutes. 2.Clicky

Clicky allows you to monitor, analyse and react to site traffic in real time. You can analyse each visitor individually and see exactly what they do on your website. There is also an on-site analytics widget in the corner of your website that tracks current traffic and allows you to launch heatmap reporting for that page.

3.SERPs.com

SERPs updates SEO data daily. You can monitor organic traffic, top rankings and link metrics. You can also conduct SEO experiments and analyse large groups of keyword sets. Rank tracking is available in over 100 countries. SERPs integrates with Google Analytics, allowing you to link analytics with daily rankings.

4.SimilarWeb.com

SimilarWeb generates traffic statistics for any website or app. Find out the global, country and category rank as well as which countries the majority of traffic is coming from. You can also analyse the top search terms (both organic and paid) and display ads that lead to your competitors’ websites.

5.Majestic.com

Majestic gives you the backlink history of any website – including the number of external backlinks, referring domains, referring IPs and referring subnets. This identifies the pages that are bringing the most traffic to your website.

6.Birst

The Birst Marketing Analytics Accelerator integrates marketing data from both online and offline sources. You explore the data using interactive dashboards and visual data discovery to sort through the vast amount of information available. There is also a pre-built data model integrating data from sources such as Marketo, salesforce.com and Google Analytic apps.

7.uberVU via Hootsuite

uberVU via Hootsuite produces real time data about your brand. You can track social conversations related to your business from 100 million sources and across 26 platforms in over 50 languages. Discover who the influencers are in your industry and what everyone is talking about. Hootsuite not only helps you manage your social media but also helps you implement campaigns across these platforms.

8.Followerwonk.com

Followerwonk gives you a breakdown of your Twitter followers and their characteristics, allowing for easy segmentation. You can compare your account against competitors and get a social authority score for each follower to identify the most influential ones.

9.SumAll.com

SumAll sends you a weekly custom report of all your social media metrics. Find out which posts are performing, identify trends and keywords, understand your most influential followers and see how far your content has reached. There’s also an online dashboard if you want an overview of the analytics.

10.ManageFlitter.com

ManageFlitter offers a range of tools to track who is and isn’t following you back, sort through your followers by a range of criteria, and identify relevant people who are likely to follow you back. PowerPost is a feature that helps your tweets get seen by your followers by determining when most of them are online.

The power of information cannot be denied. This means you must let these analytrics tools empower you to use data in the most efficient way to be better than your competitors.